Friday, August 20, 2010

Taiwanese researchers' special take on virtualization means far fewer servers and less energy

By YU-TZU CHIU / AUGUST 2010

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

19 August 2010—Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft consume a lot of their players' time. They also consume a lot of energy, as more than a thousand servers can be required to create one game's virtual worlds. Last year, Yeng-Ting Lee, a 26-year-old online game fanatic, began to wonder if there was an easy way to reduce their energy consumption. Lee, who is a research assistant at the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, in Taipei, Taiwan, says he has found a way to cut MMORPG power consumption in half. Last month he revealed the solution at the IEEE Cloud 2010 conference.

The computing needs of online gaming firms can be hard to meet. MMORPGs' hourly and daily workloads fluctuate widely, because many people don't or can't play during work hours or on weekdays, and each firm often plays host to several games at once.

Firms in the online gaming industry tend to have more computational power than they really need. One main reason is that their games use a so-called sharded architecture. Multiple identical game worlds, known as "realms" to the more than 10 million players in World of Warcraft, allow the game to be divided up into virtual worlds containing manageable populations. But servers must be capable of satisfying the largest population, even if the actual population playing in a given realm is much smaller. Such a design can be a headache, because as long as one player is active in a realm, the machine serving that realm cannot be shut down. And a nearly idle machine can still consume 60 percent of the energy of a fully loaded one.

Lee's adviser, Kuan-Ta Chen (now known as Sheng-Wei Chen), a 34-year-old assistant research fellow at the institute, is an experienced gamer. He says that the industry is desperately seeking a more cost-effective way to run their business.

Chen and Lee devised a "zone-based server consolidation strategy" to help MMORPGs reduce their power consumption. It takes advantage of the fact that players interact mostly with others situated near them within a virtual world, a property they call "spatial locality."

The researchers partitioned a game world into multiple disjoint "zones." They consider such a zone a perfect unit of computational effort that can be dispatched to whatever servers are available.

They used the zone divisions as the basis for turning a number of real servers into virtual machines. Virtualization, a strategy that is sweeping the server field, emulates one or more virtual computers within a physical one. The software installed in a virtual computer runs as it does in a physical one, and the virtual machine can be moved from one physical computer to another without causing interruption.

In Lee and Chen's system, if a game's virtual world contains n zones, it can be served by n processes. Each process can reside in its own virtual machine, or VM. VMs can be added and removed as zones fill with or empty of players, allowing the computing needs of a virtual world to scale up or down quickly and easily.

Using a set of real-life player statistics from World of Warcraft, collected over 273 days in 2006 at a Taiwan-based realm, Lee and Chen conducted a simulation of their idea. The simulation suggested that by reallocating the computing needs of each zone every hour, the number of servers needed could be reduced by 52 percent and electricity consumption by 62 percent. And it can all be done without degrading the user experience, says Chen.

"For the application in the gaming industry, we evaluate that about 30 percent of investment in servers could be saved," Chen says.

Blizzard Entertainment, World of Warcraft's creator, wouldn't comment on its server strategy or Lee and Chen's scheme. Gilbert Hsieh, technical director at Taiwan-based Gamania Digital Entertainment, says that his company, which develops and distributes online game software, will use Lee and Chen's server-consolidation strategy. "It's based on the avatar behavior in the real world. We've decide to work with the team for at least one year to learn how good the effectiveness could be when the strategy is applied on our products," Hsieh says, though he expects that virtualization might somewhat compromise the performance of the company's servers.

Sunday, August 01, 2010

The nation plans to invest hundreds of millions to seed cloud-computing efforts

By Yu-Tzu Chiu / August 2010

Think Taiwan and you think manufacturing, not services. But the island's government wants to change that. Taiwan plans to invest NT $24 billion (US $744 million) in the development of cloud-computing technology and services over the next five years. The government predicts that the cloud-computing sector will be worth US $31 billion globally by 2014 and wants its industry to get involved now in order to get a piece of it. Cloud computing uses the Internet and remote servers to store data and run applications for devices such as computers and smartphones.

"We should take advantage of Taiwan's strong information and communications technology industry, further upgrading it in order to seize business opportunities involving cloud-computing technology," Premier Den-yih Wu told reporters in April. Officials said that the development of the technology would help push integration among the hardware, software, and service industries, so that eventually Taiwan would be able to export cloud services.

According to Wu's administration, the government's five-year investment is expected to be matched by NT $112.7 billion in investments from the private sector, including NT $12.7 billion for R&D. The government estimates the efforts will create 50 000 new jobs.

To speed things along, Wu ordered the establishment of a cabinet-level advisory task force, to help government agencies choose projects to fund and find ways to remove barriers to investment in private sector cloud efforts.

Ming-ji Wu, director general of the Department of Industrial Technology under the Ministry of Economic Affairs, told reporters that the government cash will go to help with supply, demand, and governance of cloud-computing services. On the supply side, it will go toward the integration of cloud-computing systems, data centers, application software, new products, broadband networks, and testing mechanisms. On the demand side, the government is building its own cloud to combine the information systems in over 4000 government agencies nationwide into two or three cloud-computing centers to be located at the country's science-based industrial parks.

The government push follows some investment by foreign firms. Last November, Microsoft signed a deal with the Taiwanese government to jointly establish a cloud-computing research center. Microsoft inked a separate agreement with Taiwan's largest phone company, Chunghwa Telecom, allowing the carrier to deploy the Windows Azure operating system for its cloud-technology applications.

Though its hopes for the cloud-computing initiative are high, Taiwan's track record with government science and technology programs is spotty. Just weeks after the plan was announced, the Control Yuan, the highest supervisory organ of the central government, censured the National Science Council for poorly designing seven ongoing national science and technology programs. According to the Control Yuan, by the end of 2008, NT $84.15 billion had been invested in those programs, but little of industrial use had been gained.

Many other large, cross-agency programs besides those censured by the Control Yuan are also failing, says Chih-cheng Lo, an associate professor of political science at Soochow University in Taipei. "The policymaking process deserves improvement," he says.